Recently, portable terminals have experienced a sudden spreading of a use because of a convenience of portability. Thus, service providers (i.e., system manufacturers) are competitively developing portable terminals with more convenient functions to attract many users.
For example, the portable terminals are providing functions such as phonebooks, games, schedulers, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Message Service (MMS), Broadcast Message Service (BMS), Internet service, electronic mail (e-mail), morning wakeup calls, MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) players, digital cameras, and the like.
Thus, a user of the portable terminal that includes the above functions stores data generated by using the functions. For example, the user of the portable terminal stores an image captured using a digital camera function or stores data for MP3 playing.
With an increase of an amount of the data, a method in which a user can search data stored in his/her own portable terminal should be provided, but general portable terminals search and manage data using a fixed interface such as a menu of a tree structure.
The above method is a method unsuitable for managing much data of a high-quality portable terminal, and a user has to select a menu one by one and manage corresponding data.
Also, a conventional portable terminal is configured to determine information on data itself (i.e., basic information of data name, capacity, and so forth) and thus does not provide information associated with corresponding data. Thus, there is a problem that a user has to determine and manage data piece by piece.
To provide a solution to the above problem, there is a need for an apparatus and method for providing a simple and convenient data management way to the user of the portable terminal.